Monday, February 17, 2014

I was explaining to the kids that we capitalize the names of dieties and religious texts because they are holy.

Holy.

It set off sparks.

A little hand shot up, and one of the nine-year-olds insisted that she would not be capitalizing the names of other people's gods, her face resolute and unswerving. "Because they aren't holy. They aren't real. They aren't anything."

"Ok," I murmured, swerving, and wondered if I could just let this slide. "But they are names though. I mean, they are capitalized because they are names. Of things. Even if they aren't real."

She thought about it for a few seconds then resolutely replied "But it's Kufr. So actually we can only capitalize the name of Allah."

This seemed like a good time for slide-letting. I'll just think of it as developing her critical thinking skills.

Later in the lesson, the little hand shot up again. She took offense to the sentence, "The Muslim girl wearing hijab distinctly stood out in the crowd of people at church." It wasn't a great sentence, but it got its point across.

"But the sentence is wrong," she explained, "because a Muslim girl would never be in a church."

I tried to explain that since it was physically possible though, hypothetically, for this to happen, the sentence was in fact grammatically correct. But she was sticking to her guns. She gave a look of disapproval to the girl sitting behind her who had thought of the sentence, and who immediately recanted and tried to come up with another way to use the word "distinctly."

I still can't tell if it is a fail or a win for me as a teacher, but I'm leaning towards win.

Lesson learned: Faith trumps grammar.

Meanwhile, I am failing at trying to teach a little Arab kid how to speak English. She starting from scratch and still answers me in squeaks and other meaningful "cultural noises." I am slightly concerned that half of what I point to, she calls "family" -

but it's better than a squeak.

And as I struggle to get her to speak, I am comforted by the thought that floating in the overall-failing are mini forward-moving motions accompanied by colorful stationary in a large ziplock bag labelled "incentives."